The unruly teenager, tactics, and a terrible strategy
A couple of years ago, in addition to being a co-founder of the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) innovation team, I was asked if I could take on an additional role, and temporarily look after our Innovation Service whilst a new Head of Service was searched for. Our previous leader was promoted into another position, leaving us, once again, as an orphaned Service without a leader. We’d already undergone a big shift in the way that we viewed and understood innovation and its role within the UNHCR) — and beyond. A series of events occurred in 2017 that led us to once again take a very different approach to innovation within the humanitarian and United Nations space.
We focused on values and focused on what we cared about, vehemently distancing ourselves from Tech Bros and cookie-cutter approaches to innovation. We pushed for a profile for the new Head of Service that looked a lot different to many other innovation teams, and tested a new process for recruitment. Ultimately that process — an experiment in itself — failed.
Now that we have a new Head of Service, I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on those past two years, and I have to say that I found them challenging in ways I had not anticipated but probably should have anticipated. Content-wise, not so much, but playing two roles in one human-being is fraught with asymmetries and internal conflict. So I wanted to share what I think I’ve learned.
Two birds, same stone
Within this team, my role has always been as a Deputy, which sometimes meant the person who executes direction, sometimes the person who provides advice on direction. Typically, this meant that I’ve tried to take care of team management, shorter term fire-fighting, the borrowing of budgets, and the day-to-day scraps that we often find ourselves in. Tactics have played an important role in establishing innovation as a unit within UNHCR — the previous High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, formalised our existence in 2014, after several years of honing tactics of survival. Tactics, as well as strategy, have played an important role in sustaining the team.
I found that making this transition while at the same time rethinking our strategy was quite something else, particularly with a team that reached a certain level of maturity. Today, I half-jokingly speak about the current Service (there’s a bureaucratic distinction) as being an unruly teenager that needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. It’s a team that has mood swings, it has iterated a lot, had disagreements with parental figures, made mistakes with homework and at school, lamented and lusted, dealt with rejection for the first time, and hasn’t had to deal with adulting. And when I say this I don’t mean that the team members are bratty teenagers, but rather that the Innovation Service has played its role in challenging the status quo, to make mistakes. And now in terms of innovation’s lifecycle within UNHCR, it’s at another crossroads where new sets of decisions need to be made as to the next stage of its life.
And that’s where strategy came in and where I ultimately failed. I mean, not a small failure, but a festering, seething, car crash of a failure. One that still stings a bit to this day. You can read the artefact that represents the 2018 innovation strategy here and draw your own conclusions.
Five things I learned:
1. Don’t consult the echo-chamber.
The first mistake that I made was bringing tactics to the strategy process. I tried to articulate direction in a short space of time and whilst I tried desperately to use inclusivity, and diversity, I based both approaches on our team alone. So I kept strategy development confined within, or rather, shackled to, an echo-chamber. Our echo-chamber. The one that I was trying to lead.
2. Be better informed, but be aware of your bias.
The second mistake that I made was reading too many Harvard Business Review articles. I don’t know about you, but Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, the RSA podcasts, sometimes ReplyAll, are all go-to resources when I want to learn something quite quickly. As in, again using tactics. And I got stuck on this article titled, Why Strategy Execution Unravels — and What to Do About It. I think what resonated, or what I found so interesting was that we can get caught up on strategy and miss other important elements of execution. And don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a great article, and if in the right hands it would be devastatingly useful. But it was in my hands. And they were the wrong hands for it to be in, and those hands were attached to the wrong brain. I was stuck on the idea that strategy was indeed something that we could articulate and then iterate on regularly. The main problem was that the parameters were not strong enough to be able to test, and I’d inadvertently, or maybe deliberately — built an apology for tactics already into the strategy.
3. Never assume how people will interpret your version of reality.
The third error that I made was everything around the strategy itself. I didn’t socialise our strategy but saw it as a continuation of our approach of embracing values. I had made one massive assumption that I didn’t test: that people were following, could follow, or rather, cared enough to follow our narrative.
Unfortunately or fortunately, that was a terrible, terrible assumption to make, and I found that even the team that I was trying to lead, to manage, and to direct, actually wanted or rather needed and wanted more. So imagine you’re somebody else who doesn’t sit in our team in Nairobi, Budapest, Geneva, or now Panama — it is even more foreign for you to interpret.
We’d become enlivened and inspired by diversity and inclusion as values that we could get behind. But even within the team we (and I’m not sure if this is ironic or not) disagree to this day on how we understand diversity and inclusion. For me, diversity of thought is incredibly important. For another member of the team, an LGBTQI lens is an important element. For another, making innovation more accessible and better understood is what drives them, for another, they are less articulate about diversity and inclusion because they think it’s just common sense, or good business to practice it. The long story short: nobody outside of the team knew what we did, or rather, how to engage with us…which really I guess would be an opposite outcome to the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion. Or at the very least the inclusion part.
4. Stop believing it has to be perfect. It’s not, and it never will please everybody.
I cared too much. Not about the strategy working or not working, but about the members of the team. I cared about what they thought about the minutest of details, instead of one of many other better approaches that might have included saying well, here are our parameters, now let’s execute. Because the thing is, when you’re in a diverse team, or rather, a team with such diversity of thought(s), you’re never going to get it right in anybody’s eyes, ears, or any other sense. And that’s okay — human even, in all the best and worst ways. What you need to do is create the best working environment that includes spaces for healthy exchanges between peers; for clear, transparent, and accountable decision making.
5. No matter your position — don’t ever stop learning.
I didn’t invest in my own learning and development. It’s very easy to try to promote a culture of learning within a team, and to push people to take opportunities to learn. In our team we had one person take a masters course in refugee law, another person taking french classes, another learning R and Python. Somebody else who took a course in Risk Management, and the list goes on. But I didn’t push myself to learn about strategy development, so ultimately failed the team who needed to implement, or execute the strategy that we eventually came up with. And just to recap for you all: it was a festering pile of…well, it was a festering pile of words.
So I’m not entirely sure what this means in terms of a conclusion or something that I can suggest other people do, other than none of the above. But if I were to be pushed (as I write this, Lauren is writing me on Slack telling me that I need both a conclusion and an action point), I’d probably say three things:
1) Apply your innovation rhetoric to the process, not only the ‘final product’, and challenge your assumptions as early on as possible;
2) Be comfortable with strategy development taking time — don’t add a deadline to it, ease into an inclusive process and you’ll know when it’s ready to be implemented. In the meantime, you’ve probably already got a lot of ongoing work;
3) Strategies are not a panacea for good management, or anything else for that matter. They’re a direction, and how you implement will make or break that direction.
